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In Astra Terra, you are the leader and governor of a small colony of hyper-advanced aliens sent out at near-light speeds to colonize the closest planet to their home. You have been sent out in the hopes of heading off the colonization of the planet by a fleet of colonists of an enemy faction, sent out a hundred years prior who are making their way to the same planet at slower speeds. Although the bulk of their settlers will arrive some two hundred years after you launch, and a hundred years after you arrive at your destination, they had sent out a fleet of smaller military ships to prepare the planet which you will have to begin dealing with soon after you arrive. On your home planet, you’ve already defeated the enemy, but the battle will play out again in space. Will you be able to hold back the enemy forces and survive their onslaught to create a viable colony for your species?
While your technology is lightyears ahead of the enemy combatants, you still have to set up and prepare for them, since they vastly outnumber you and your biotech can’t be stored and deployed on a planet’s surface without adapting to local genetic and environmental conditions. They, meanwhile, make use of traditional machinery and technology. You must develop your technology, choosing what is and isn’t a priority both for biological improvements to your fighters and settlers and your base modules themselves. Can you prepare and create your technology in order to soon enough to snatch victory from the iron claws of cold, hard technology?
Command an army of colonists in base-building and real-time strategy combat while controlling your own leader character and exploring a procedurally generated world with diverse biomes, unusual flora and fauna, and detailed yet understandable simulation systems. Fast travel to anywhere not blocked by an obstacle or enemy as you place bridges and inhabit your world. Will you be able to take the greatest advantage of your virgin planet?
Build a base and colony of your own, taking advantage of technology, and systems such as electricity, water, and steam simulations. Build modules, blocks, and workshops to mine the planet, research new technologies, refine materials, and protect your assets. Enter a brand new world, and take it for your own!

Hi LorenzoGatti, adding a grid would improve visibility but make the graphics kinda ugly. Not sure if its worth it?
I've taken some extra suggestions that some people have given and integrated the mouse position into the UI.
Some updated screenshots:
Here's the new cursor in action:

I've implemented the stacked cursor (I forget who's suggestion that was) and fixed the solider's rendering. I also added a few biomes and things. Here are some updated screenshots.
CHANGELOG:
1. Added desert biome (only shows up on worlds close to their sun and therefore with little water and a lower sea level)
2. Snow biome (on very high peaks and stuff)
3. Beach plants
4. More variety in forests
Keep in mind that these biomes are compressed and not particularly realistic in the interest of making the game interesting.

Kenlog,
Thanks for the compliment! The graphics were actually rendered out by my artist so its at least 60% his baby.
I don't know how much harder it would be, tbh. I don't have a lot of 3D programming experience, but I would assume it wouldn't be very hard at all, and it's certainly an interesting idea! You should run with it! The only possible issue is blending the various textures for the land, and it might be more efficient just to use marching cubes, but that's just a guess.

Hi Learn2develop, this is the first major game I've ever made, actually. Although I've dabbled in game development for about five of the nine years I've actually been programming. This game has been in development for about two years, but as I stated in the original question I recently switched graphics rendering libraries and switched from orthogonal 2D rendering to isometric. I actually made the switch about 5 days ago, and what you're seeing is about three or four days of real work on the graphics. That's also why I don't have a UI in place: since I switched rendering engines I had to re-do all that too. But yeah, I've finished the colonist/minion/soldier AI, world generation, mining resources and cutting down trees, hauling behaviors for stockpiles. All I need to do now (and I'm guessing it's going to take me another year, what with college and all) is finish the construction AI (both for simple walls and workshops/generators/big building units), tech tree and fighting AI. So right now I'm about 60-70% done. I plan to make this game multiplayer but that's more of something I'm going to work on in tandem with a Kickstarter.
Do you think just dimming lower levels could work too? I could do shadows, in fact I kind of plan on it, but right now I'm barely getting 60fps as it is and it might make the rendering truly slow to od shadows.
Actually it is limited to your current Z-level, but I guess your confusion proves your point In any case, number 2 is actually a really good idea! I should try that. It might help a LOT with clarity. I could show opaque grey selection boxes under the cursor box to show how many z-levels you are away from the floor/ bottom level.
Hey Bregma, to be honest, I was pretty confident that people would be able to figure out the graphics, my only issue was if I could make it so that there wasn't much to figure out, ie how to improve on games like Gnomoria. My artist (who mostly plays FPS games, I'm a Dwarf Fortress megafan) wasn't so sure.

Hi nicster, so yeah if you're just going straight up and down levels, the cursor (which is the red block, correct) stays on the same x,y point. In the screenshots, it is on the same x,y point, but the current Z level, on each of the screenshots except maybe the last. Hope that helps! Also, I don't have a way of doing manual mines yet, I could add that if it would help a lot.
Concerning what you're seeing with the colonists, whats going on with them (if you didn't visit the gamedev stackexchange link) is that they are rendering to the correct isometric point, but since I render them as a batch after the rest of the map is rendered (this is a temporary stopgap), they still render on top of everything, even when they should be behind it.

Okay, in answer to Nicster's suggestion:
Attached are a few images of the same cliff/hill/area of progressively decreasing Z axis.
Please excuse the colonists, they were intent on getting in the shot, and since the moveable entity drawing code actually doesn't work right currently (https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/163092/render-moveable-entities-into-3d-isometric-world) it's a little weird.
So, how selection will work is that the user just draws a selection square on whatever level they're currently viewing, and if they're selecting colonists it'll just select all the colonists on any Z axis that fall under that square. If they're selecting terrain (as in, designating an area to mine), then since they're selecting tiles filled with blocks, they'd just do a regular square to select those, a 2D square. I'm not sure if or how that would make selecting units harder, but it might?

Hi Nicster,
These are just random screenshots from the maximum Z level.
That's a good idea! I don't have the new UI place to actually order the colonists to mine (when I went from 2D to isometric I also switched graphics libraries so I have to re-do the interface from scratch), but i can just choose a particularly interesting land feature and show a few Z levels of that.

Thanks Iltis. I'll get right on that.
Okay I've fixed the images and made the question a little clearer. FYI for everyone, those images are displaying really low-resolution versions on this website, click on them for a clearer image (this is pixel art, after all).

Hi everyone! This is my first post here. I'm an indie game developer with plans to release a game on Steam. The game I'm working on is a multiplayer real-time strategy game with base building elements modeled on RimWorld (tech tree and big base components, but also mining and building walls, etc), but also with a Z-axis involved. Currently, my game is about 67% of the way done, so I have the world generation, mining, stockpiling and movement done, and structures in place for the rest. It was originally going to be a 2D, orthogonal game with different levels shown a few at a time from above, like Dwarf Fortress, but the artist that I'm working with convinced me that using a more 3-dimensional view would be beneficial, both for ergonomics and understandability. We decided on using a staggered isometric view since that would be easier and more stylish than doing pure 3D, and prevent awkward camera issues. I've implemented the isometric view, using art that my artist 3D modeled and then exported as pixel art. I've attached some representative screenshots to this post.
The new isometric graphics are in early stages right now (its been five days exactly since I ripped out 2,400 lines of 2D draw code), so there's no UI to speak of and some optimizations (culling of underground tiles) may be acting up. Also, there are multiple biomes and unique grasses and flowers, dirt, stone, etc in the worldgen but my artist hasn't got around to doing those yet so we just have common-denominator art right now.
Also, the world generation algorithm is not set in stone. Right now, it uses several layers of simplex noise, plus adding random hills and then doing rain erosion simulations. After that, it adds biomes (which you can't see) based on height, temperature, proximity to water, etc. The height of the terrain is actually modified into a few flat planes by dividing the height output by the noise algorithm by four, then multiplying it by 2.5, and then casting to an integer (so throwing away the decimal). So, for instance, pillars of rock/dirt, and the fact that the beaches are kind of too high over the water are things we will eventually fix.
I'm pretty confident that the world generation is simple enough and the graphics clear enough to be understandable for modern strategy gamers but my artist has doubts. Do any of you have opinions on this? Also, if anyone has any suggestions as to how to make it clearer what level the user is looking at currently, or how to make Z-axis clearer, please let me know!
Thanks!